Deschampsia cespitosa

Tufted hair grass, Tufted Hair Grass

Family: Poaceae · Type: perennial · Native

Tufted hair grass is a native perennial found in various California regions in meadows, grasslands, and forest openings at elevations ranging from low to high montane zones. Flowering from June to August, this grass produces delicate purple-tinted spikelets with slender, pale inflorescences that can range from narrow to open. Growing in dense to loose clumps with stems 20 to 100 centimeters tall, it forms distinctive grassy tussocks with flexible stems. Its leaves are narrow and flat to slightly rolled, typically 8 to 20 centimeters long and 1 to 4 millimeters wide, with ligules 3 to 8 millimeters long that can be acute or obtuse. The plant's lemmas feature subtle purple-tipped glumes with delicate awns that emerge from or below the middle of each floret.

California counties: Humboldt, Alpine, Butte, Fresno, Napa, Placer, Plumas, San Mateo, Tuolumne, Sierra, Siskiyou, Tulare, Mono, San Bernardino, Sonoma, Lake, Marin, El Dorado, Mendocino, Shasta, Lassen, Tehama, Mariposa, Del Norte, Nevada, Modoc, Trinity, Inyo, San Luis Obispo, San Francisco, Monterey, Santa Cruz, Colusa, Amador, Solano, Kern, Madera, Contra Costa, Riverside, Ventura

Data from The California Species Project — 14,000+ California species with verified data from CNPS, CDFW, USFWS, Jepson eFlora, Cal-IPC, and more.